


a captive audience

by tunemyart



Category: Xena: Warrior Princess
Genre: F/F, it's really just two ladies and a baby, my obsession with bard!Gabrielle continues, unapologetically not touching the goings-on of Season 5 except for a few brief mentions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-15
Updated: 2020-02-15
Packaged: 2021-02-28 06:01:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,273
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22739230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tunemyart/pseuds/tunemyart
Summary: When it all came down to it, Xena supposed it was all her own fault anyway. “Why don’t you talk to the baby?” she’d said. “Tell it some of your stories?”Motherhood, take two, for Xena and Gabrielle. Nebulously set throughout Season 5, because there had to have been some good pregnancy and baby times.
Relationships: Gabrielle/Xena
Comments: 35
Kudos: 150





	a captive audience

When it all came down to it, Xena supposed it was all her own fault anyway. 

“Why don’t you talk to the baby?” she’d said. “Tell it some of your stories?” 

It had been too early for her to show, and the look of hurt and betrayal was still lurking just behind Gabrielle’s eyes. It had taken awhile for her to stop waiting for Xena to confess that yes, she _had_ in fact abandoned a none-the-wiser Gabrielle for half an hour in some town somewhere to grab the first man she could find and have quick, dirty, raunchy sex with him, because after all that was the kind of person Xena was all these years into being in love with Gabrielle. 

It stung, sure, but on her good days, Xena understood _._ On her good days, Xena succumbed to daydreams she hadn’t had even when she was a teenager - and certainly not when she was pregnant with Solan - about what having this baby would be like; and a hazy new sense of family started to fall over her, swathing her and her belly and Gabrielle in a comforting gauze that seemed to make the rest of the world softer to the touch as well as her eyes. 

It had been outward enough that Gabrielle had noticed. “You’re softer now that you know,” she told Xena one day as they ambled along. 

Xena caught herself mid-hum, hand on her still-mostly-flat belly, and met Gabrielle’s knowing eyes with a reflexive scowl. Gabrielle raised her hands defensively. “What? It’s not a bad thing.” 

“Hmm,” Xena grumbled reluctantly, not at all sure she agreed. “I guess. I’d better make it your job to make sure I don’t go too soft, huh?” 

She’d meant it as a joke, but Gabrielle gave another one of those tight little smiles that Xena had gotten used to being on the receiving end of in the last several days and looked away. Frowning, Xena came in front of her and touched her shoulder - as safe a place as any - and said, “Hey. Somethin’ wrong?” _Something more than the obvious, anyway._

“No,” Gabrielle answered, her tone giving nothing away, though her next words were enough to negate that intention: “Good to know I’m good for something.” 

Xena stopped short and tightened her hand on Gabrielle’s shoulder. “Hey,” she said sharply as Gabrielle reluctantly stopped with her. “What exactly is that supposed to mean?” 

“Nothing,” Gabrielle replied, clearly exasperated with herself and still enough on edge that Xena could have her answer if she pushed just a little further. Xena did, raising an eyebrow and letting a little bit of hurt to creep into her expression. 

It was enough. Gabrielle crumpled and looked away. 

“I just - I’m happy for you. I am,” she said. 

Xena wasn’t entirely sure who she was trying to convince between the two of them, but her words set off a more immediate alarm. “Happy for _me?”_ she repeated. 

Gabrielle shrugged, nonchalantly enough to set off still more alarms.

“I guess it just makes me wonder where this leaves me.” 

“Where this leaves you?” Xena said, disbelief creeping into her tone. “What are you talking about? It leaves you - leaves _us_ \- the same place we’ve always been. Unless you have a problem with that?” 

Gabrielle didn’t rise to the bait. “Come on, Xena,” she said. “You can’t pretend that this baby - any child between us - doesn’t change everything.” 

A cold feeling crept over Xena as the ghosts Gabrielle wouldn’t name rose up between them, finally permeating that gauzy seclusion that had insulated Xena’s world like an unexpected winter frost. There was guilt still in the way Gabrielle was having trouble meeting her eyes; and while Xena couldn’t bear, even after all this time, to speak words that might dispel it, she could do something about the separation Gabrielle was starting to sink into. 

Xena took her hand. Startled, Gabrielle looked up, finally met her eyes. Xena smiled and placed her hand on her stomach, where Gabrielle’s fingers flexed over her leathers. 

“It changes everything,” Xena agreed. “But nothing that matters.” 

“Xena - “ Gabrielle started again. 

“ _Nothing_ that matters,” Xena insisted, and encouraged her tentative hand to splay more comfortably over the place where, somehow, Xena’s baby was growing. “Talk to the baby.” 

“What?” Gabrielle said with a confused laugh and the nose scrunch that, more than anything, told Xena that everything was going to be fine. “Now?” 

“If you want. I want it to know your voice,” she said, and watched as understanding started to break over her face, clear as the dawn. “It should know your voice as well as it knows mine.” 

There were words Xena still hadn’t said about trust and motherhood and the way this baby knit them together in her mind as surely as their past experiences had driven them apart. There was time to discover them, though; and for the moment, she could see, this was enough. 

That night Xena obligingly stripped off her leathers so that skin and muscle would be the only obstacles between her child and Gabrielle’s voice. 

“Come on,” she urged as she pulled Gabrielle down with her. Hesitantly, Gabrielle came, propping herself up on an elbow as she gazed at Xena’s as-of-yet unchanged form. 

“I feel like an idiot. What am I supposed to say?” 

Xena shrugged. “I dunno. It’s not like I have a lot of experience with this.” If Borias had ever had the bright idea to try something so cloyingly sentimental, she would have thrown him out of her bed and her tent a lot faster than she actually had. “You can just talk to me if you don’t feel comfortable.” 

“No, I mean - I should be comfortable,” Gabrielle insisted, looking up toward Xena with that same stubborn determinedness she’d had since day one, when it had stared at a much more hardened Xena out the face of a teenager. Much as it had then, it softened Xena now, and she encouraged Gabrielle to lay more comfortably against her.

“Why don’t you tell it one of your stories?” she suggested before succumbing to a yawn. “Just keep me out of it.” 

It was a standard request between them on the road when Gabrielle would pass the time practicing her barding skills and refining her pacing and gestures and placement of details on her captive audience of one. Gabrielle chuckled, very familiar with the request, and relaxed just as Xena had intended. 

“Alright,” she said, and her voice slipped into its characteristic performance modalities, familiar to Xena as breathing. “This is a very old story, older than the trees and the rivers and even the mountains, and I will tell it to you as it was told to me…” 

Xena drifted off to the sound of her voice and the weight of her body, a smile on her face, the world gauzy and soft around them both.

  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  


The first few weeks after Eve’s birth had left them too tired to do much more than collapse between running and Eve’s too-frequent and unpredictable crying schedule. 

“Sweetheart, can’t you tone it down?” Xena was reduced to begging her when Eve was only a week or so old, her astounding loudness at odds with her tiny form and fragile bones. 

That much she remembered from the aftermath of giving birth to Solan - the stunning fragility of his life in her young, bloodstained hands; how his perfection had thrown the ugliness of the world she’d created for herself into stark relief and made her, however temporarily, question everything. 

Maybe that was why it was harder to recall the rest of it. Xena remembered riding a horse for fifteen miles within a week and a half of giving birth last time, and walking ten miles a day even earlier. Maybe she’d been more stubborn back then. Maybe she just hadn’t been old. More likely she hadn’t had a Gabrielle refusing to let her try when she couldn’t hide the fact that even a slow saunter through the shadows left her winded, sore, and exhausted. 

“We get through this and I promise you can cry as much as you want, huh?” Xena offered Eve, to no effect. “Whaddya say?” 

Gabrielle’s nerves were already frayed as badly as hers with the way she up almost as often as Xena was, and sometimes more. Tonight alone she’d woken up five times prompted by Eve’s crying. Three of those times she’d found Gabrielle still prowling their campsite with sais in hand. 

“Go go sleep,” Xena begged her while she was at it. “At least one of the three of us should have a decent night’s sleep, and I’m the one with the food supply. Process of elimination means that’s you. So congratulations - now get over here and lay down and close your eyes.” 

Gabrielle snorted. “Nice try. I’m just nervous after the day we had, okay? This helps me relax.” 

Seeing her own coping habits grafted onto Gabrielle had always caused a pang of something that wasn’t quite regret, but sure wasn’t joy either, in Xena’s heart. 

“It makes you feel better, is what you mean,” she called her out. 

“Alright, yeah,” Gabrielle agreed. “Fine. It does. But since you’re the one actively creating the food supply, why don’t you go back to sleep and I’ll take watch?” 

“And what are you gonna do when we’ve got company and you’re too exhausted to aim your weapons straight?” A dark look crossed Gabrielle’s face, and Xena knew she had her. “Look, we’ll compromise. We’ll both sleep. Trust me, my senses are on hair trigger enough for all three of us between new mother instincts and all the rest of it.”

“If you can get Eve to quiet down, I’d say you might have a deal,” Gabrielle said wryly. 

“You’re only saying that because you don’t think I can,” Xena accused her. As if hearing her cue, Eve’s wails grew momentarily louder, which in turn prompted Gabrielle to throw her a look that clearly said _You’re the one who said it._

“You know what,” Xena started hotly before she was struck by sudden inspiration. 

“What?” Gabrielle prompted at Xena’s sudden silence, but her answer came in the form of Xena approaching and carefully depositing the baby in her surprised arms. 

“Your turn,” Xena announced cheerfully as she could manage with still-sore nether parts, leaking breasts, and spit up in her unkempt hair. Not to mention the constant anxiety and sleep deprivation. Had she mentioned the sleep deprivation? 

Miraculously, Eve’s crying didn’t immediately transform into outright screeching at being displaced from the familiarity of her mother’s warmth. 

“What do you want me to do?” Gabrielle asked, looking vaguely panicked when she correctly read Xena’s intention to leave the situation in her hands. Gabrielle of course had shouldered her own share of caregiving for Eve, but Xena had perhaps been… overzealous… in her insistence on spearheading a solution for her every need to this point.

“You just spent nine months talking to her,” she offered as she eased herself back down. “Seems like you’ve got a lot in common. Maybe she’ll listen to you.”

With that, Xena burrowed her aching, exhausted body into her still-warm nest of blankets and shut her eyes. In the background, Eve was still whimpering, about ten seconds away from a renewal of her crying fit. But Gabrielle sighed, and Xena could hear them both begin to settle down. 

“Your mommy doesn’t think we know what she’s doing,” her voice quietly drifted over to Xena. “But we do, don’t we? Hmm? Wow, I guess you do know my voice. Xena,” she called softly. “Did you hear that? It worked.”

“Mmmph,” Xena groaned in acknowledgement, taking it on faith that Gabrielle would be able to interpret that she was pleased. Gabrielle’s quiet chuckle was enough to tell Xena she had before she went back to speaking softly to Eve.

“Are you really gonna listen to me? You know it’ll make your mommy jealous.” Eve hiccuped in response. “Yes, that’s a nice milk bubble. You’re all full and dry and warm, and we’re gonna keep you safe.” Eve’s hiccup turned into a short cry, which Gabrielle soothed. “Shh, shh. I get it, you don’t like thinking about that. How about… I guess you were never really in a place where you could tell me if you liked my stories before, huh? A little hard from all the way inside mommy? Should we try now? What do you say Eve, huh?” 

Xena was already drifting off. There were only two things that could have made it happen more quickly than it was, and they seemed to have each other well in hand. 

“How about… this one?” Gabrielle’s voice continued as it twined with Xena’s floating consciousness, soft and safe and inherently comforting. “A long time ago, before the gods were the gods, there was a rainstorm so fierce that even the heavens flooded…” 

* * *

  
  


“Aren’t you gonna have a good time while we’re on the horsey?” Xena asked Eve as Gabrielle was packing the last of their saddlebags before they set off for the day. “Who you gonna wave to? You gonna wave to Gabrielle? Huh? Are you gonna see Gabrielle _all day?_ Well, aren’t you a lucky baby!”

It was a dialogue Xena had with Eve roughly every morning, but it didn’t stop Gabrielle from responding to it.

“She can’t recognize my face,” she told Xena with the patience of a woman who had been pressed into watching many, many babies while growing up. “She can’t even recognize yours, she’s too little.” 

“Oh, sure she can,” Xena said confidently, making a face as she tickled Eve’s stomach and earned a wildly confused face. “Evie’s such a smart baby, aren’t you? Aren’t you?” 

Gabrielle’s expression was pure affection when Xena looked up again. Well, maybe with a little exasperation thrown in there for kicks. 

“Anyway, how do you think she’s gonna recognize our faces if we’re not in hers all the time?” Xena continued quite reasonably. 

“Don’t think I don’t know this isn’t another ploy to get me to stress out less,” Gabrielle warned.

Xena suppressed a smirk. “Gods forbid,” she joked. Unimpressed, Gabrielle fixed her with a look. “How about you just focus on the fun part of having a baby? A captive audience of one for all your barding practice? Think of all the fresh feedback you’ll be getting.” 

“What, are you sick of my barding practice? Because if that’s the case, I don’t feel like this is a solution that will help you.” 

“Nah,” Xena refuted. “A change up in your audience, though - could be useful to you, gauging reactions and all that.” 

“Xena. Eve is a baby.” 

“She’s a very, very _smart_ baby!” Xena insisted again, and was pleased when she got something closer to a laugh than she had yet out of her daughter. “Did you see that? She laughed!”

“Uh huh,” Gabrielle said, one eyebrow raised. “Give her to me and get the sling on. We’ll see if I can’t coax an actual laugh out of her, won’t we Eve? Won’t we?” 

“Yeah, because that went so well with Lachrymose,” Xena muttered, quickly affecting innocence when Gabrielle tossed her a sharp look, arms occupied by an Eve intent on wildly waving her own arms. 

“Babies are _not_ as difficult to make laugh as the actual god of despair.” 

Xena laughed and turned around to present the empty sling for Gabrielle to settle Eve into. “I guess we’ll just see about that.” 

  
  


* * *

Gabrielle took it for the challenge it was. As Xena had known she would. Gabrielle pulled out her entire barding toolkit, dispensing with the subtleties to bring out the big swords. 

Or at least, Xena assumed so based on Gabrielle’s voice and what she could sense of her movements behind her, because every time Xena turned around to comment or respond, she was met with an irked, “Xena! Turn back around. Eve can’t see me!” 

And sullenly, Xena would turn around. “ _She can’t see me!”_ she parroted under her breath. “Whatever happened to _‘oh no, she’s too little to see you, Xena!_ ’”

“Hush,” Gabrielle would tell her regally and get right back to it.

It wasn’t exactly that Xena had ever been irritated by Gabrielle’s use of the long hours on the road to try out her stories and use Xena to refine them - Xena had just always known she wasn’t the best sounding board for whatever Gabrielle was trying to get out of her stories.

“You’re actually the best person to help me exactly because you don’t have much of a literary background!” a much younger Gabrielle had piped up enthusiastically. 

“Gee, thanks,” had been a slightly miffed Xena’s response.

“Oh, I didn’t mean it that way, don’t look so dour,” Gabrielle said. “It’s just that you’re exactly the kind of person who will be in my audiences!” 

“Your audience is comprised of warlords? Or women?” Xena asked, skeptical. 

“No, I mean - “

“I know what you mean,” Xena had said to save her some time. “And stop, I’m not upset.” 

“Well, good,” Gabrielle had said. “I like you being my audience.” 

The thing was that Xena had liked it too, most days. But with the seismic shift their lives had taken since Rome and their crosses, Xena hadn’t realized that something so fundamental to Gabrielle had simply stopped, like a tap turned closed - at least, until she’d started again for Eve.

The realization left her ashamed, and then worried. What else hadn’t she noticed? Was it symptomatic of something greater, more all-encompassing, that was wrong with Gabrielle? But yet, here she was doing the bard thing for Eve, so it wasn’t a thing she’d lost completely. Just with Xena. 

“Hey, are you okay?” Gabrielle asked her that night when they’d bunked down, Eve sleeping - for once - next to them while the fire crackled away. They hadn’t had issues with the gods or their minions in days, a small miracle, and the rare sense of normalcy should have been soothing. “You’ve seemed kind of withdrawn for most of today.” 

Xena looked into her face, so familiar and yet so changed. How much of her was lost to Xena? How much of it was a bad thing rather than the natural progression of time, the inexorable metamorphosis of Gabrielle into the person she was meant to be, more glorious and yet more complex than Xena suspected that even she could imagine? 

It wasn’t a tragedy, no. But all the same, Xena couldn’t help but wonder if the girl she’d been and the bard with her had been locked away without her having realized. _Eve, you lucky girl,_ she thought, entirely in earnest. _You don’t even know the gift you’ve been given._

She knew Gabrielle could read the sentiment in her eyes, even if she didn’t have the context to decipher its meaning, and Xena reached up to caress her cheek softly.

“I’m fine. Just tired,” she replied, smiling briefly.

Gabrielle looked unconvinced, but had long ago learned when not to press. “Okay,” she said.

  
  


* * *

  
  


The thing about Gabrielle not pressing was that it never lasted long - one thing, at least, that had stayed the same.

“Alright, Xena,” she said the next evening. “Something’s wrong. Something’s _been_ wrong. What’s going on? Do you think we’re in trouble? And don’t try to distract me,” she warned. 

Xena thought about distracting or deflecting - she really did. Ultimately, she sighed, turned, and walked toward Gabrielle until she was close enough to take each of her hands in each of her own. Gabrielle appeared surprised, but waited for whatever fragile thing was poised on the tip of Xena’s tongue. 

What it turned out to be surprising even to Xena. “Tell me a story,” she requested softly. 

Gabrielle’s surprise didn’t fade, but did find a way to mix with baffled confusion. “What? You - you want me to tell you a story? I don’t understand.”

Xena shrugged, not sure she could elaborate or repeat the request. She could see the gears turning in Gabrielle’s mind as she tried to figure out its origin, if there were in fact something deeper going on that she’d missed. 

But finally, simply, all she asked was, “What kind of story?” 

“Any story. Just leave me out of it.” 

It made Gabrielle smile, and soon after Xena thought she saw her understand. 

“Okay. You want to catch us something for dinner, and I can tell you while I cook it?” she suggested. “It’ll be like old times.” 

“Sounds perfect.” 

And it was like old times, except for the way Xena was breastfeeding a fussy Eve and the way Gabrielle’s eyes were soft on them both as she watched; but her eyes and her words were for Xena, and Xena let herself fall into the comfort of it, shocked by how keenly she’d missed it. 

Afterwards, when the fire was banked for the night, when the dishes were washed and put away and Eve laid down to sleep, Gabrielle asked, “Why didn’t you say something?” 

“I didn’t realize until yesterday,” Xena answered. “And then I did say something.” 

“I’m glad you did.” 

“Me, too,” Xena said, a quiet admission, strong and fleeting as the breath that carried it. “I… I think I miss parts of you, sometimes. I wonder if being with me… the things we’ve seen, and been through…”

“I’m right here,” Gabrielle assured her. “Nothing has changed.”

“But your stories,” Xena protested quietly.

Gabrielle didn’t respond immediately. When Xena looked over to gauge her mood, worried that her words had made Gabrielle feel the loss of part of herself after all, Gabrielle’s eyes were fixed on her, dark but gleaming where they reflected the light from their fire. A calm had settled into her face and limbs, and in it Xena could read thoughtfulness, intelligence, self awareness - a combination that was telling enough when it presented itself as a reaction to Xena’s fears, tentatively voiced into the night. 

“How about I tell you another story?” she suggested at length. “It’s a short one, and one you already know. Back in the days when Xena, who some call the warrior princess - “

“Hey!”

“This is one I can’t leave you out of, I’m afraid, so you’ll just have to suck it up,” Gabrielle said firmly. “As I was saying - In the days when Xena, called by some the warrior princess, had first started to pursue the greater good, the bard Gabrielle left her side to pursue something of her own: training in the art of storytelling, the better to earn their bread and meat.” 

Xena cried foul. “You had hardly started trying to earn anything back then. I did just fine for the both of us, thank you very much.” 

“The bard learned three things from her adventure,” Gabrielle continued, ignoring Xena. “One: that she could earn bread and meat just fine without training. Two: that it was better to live her own story rather than giving it up to fabricate stories that could never be fully hers. And three: that the only audience she wanted for her story was the one she had left behind.”

Xena remained quiet once Gabrielle fell silent, lying patiently in wait for Xena’s response. Behind them, their horses grazed. To the left lay all their possessions, their moneybag concealed at the bottom of the smallest saddlebag as it usually was. Xena couldn’t think of the last time they’d tried to keep their things separate, but the greater intimacies they held in common - their bodies, their moods, their life, their child, their love - weren’t always so easily held out to the world, too precious to share in full with anyone other than each other.

“Okay,” she said.

Gabrielle’s head popped up. “Okay?” she repeated cautiously. 

“Okay,” Xena assured her, trusting Gabrielle to understand _yes, me too, thank you._ In the quirk of her lips, Xena could see she did, and she wasn’t surprised when she leaned down to kiss her. That too did the familiar warm thing to Xena’s insides, thawing her out where she hadn’t realized she was cold and bereft; and she was grinning when Gabrielle pulled away with a small bite to her upper lip. 

“Think that’ll last?” she asked suggestively with a nod toward Eve, still slumbering innocently away. 

“Long enough,” Xena decided, and deftly pinned her under her own body to Gabrielle’s breathless laugh. 

  
  


* * *

An unfamiliar sound jerked Xena from sleep straight into hyperawareness. She had her chakram in hand before she’d even sat up, blinded momentarily by the bright light breaking through the trees. 

Gabrielle was laughing quietly - and then there it was, the unfamiliar sound again. 

“Eve?” Xena said, dropping the chakram and pulling the blanket around her for warmth more than modesty as she crawled over to where Gabrielle had settled a smiling Eve into her lap. 

Eve laughed - laughed! - again, chubby hands reaching out for Xena. Xena genuinely felt like she might cry. 

“Oh sweetheart,” she said, voice choked. “Can you do that again?” 

Xena caught the motion of Gabrielle’s quick fingers tickling the soft skin of Eve’s underarm and tsked as more peals of baby laughter rang into the clearing. 

“All your bard skills and it’s come to this,” she chastised an unrepentant Gabrielle, who ceded Eve willingly into Xena’s arms. 

“Sometimes you’ve gotta improvise.” 

“Oh yeah?” Xena challenged, already having modified her voice to coo at Eve. “Where’d you learn that one from?” 

Gabrielle laughed. “ _You_ ,” she said, as if it were all Xena’s fault. 

But of all the things in the world that were Xena’s fault, this was one she didn’t mind. 


End file.
